Cogniphany

When psychologists talk about how a person thinks about their own thoughts, they call it “metacognition.” It deals with the accuracy with which a person can evaluate how they’re thinking about something, and then use that knowledge. So, when someone asks you how you’re feeling, you’re making a metacognitive evaluation of your emotions.

We take a lot of the work that goes on inside our heads for granted. We assume that when we see something that’s it’s exactly as we remember it. We saw it. How could it not be exactly that? That’s the dilemma. It all appears very seamless, but there’s a lot of filters that it all goes through, and our metacognitive evaluation of an event can be very poor.

All of this works into the topic of business risk assessment very well. Human beings are traditionally very bad about being able to properly assess levels of risk. It’s ingrained into us. When we see something bad happen to another person, we tend to assign fault to the person. When we see something good happen to another person, we tend to assign the reason for that to fate or luck. However, it’s flipped when it’s happening to us. When a bad thing happens to us personally, we tend to want to believe that it’s out of our control, and when it’s good, we had complete control over our success.

That all feeds into how we assess risk. We worry about things that have relatively little chance of happening to us, and then ignore the things that can happen to us with greater frequency. That is, we fear things that are generally out of our control, and ignore things that we can control. Richard Restak, gives a great treatment of this in the first chapter of his book, “Poe’s Heart and the Mountain Climber.”

To sum up his ideas, if you take some of the things that people are really worried about (struck by lightning, killed in an earthquake, dying in a plane crash, eaten by a shark, etc.) and compare them to other “bad things” most people who worry about these things should really just hide under their beds.

“Statistically, a specific air traveler would have to get on a commercial airplane daily for more than eight thousand years before falling victim to a multiple-fatality airplane crash.”

• Car Accident – 1 in 18,000
• Bus Accident – 1 in 4, 400,000
• Train Accident – 1 in 5,050,000
• Motorcycle Accident – 1 in 118,000
• Walking – 1 in 45,200

And really? The home is the second most dangerous place in the world.

And how this all fits into the business of risk assessment, is in just being aware of your inability to properly assess risk on the fly. If you let your brain decide for you without carefully thinking about it, you’re probably not going to make the best decision. Use evidence-based strategies and make sure that you’re making the best decision, and don’t react from the hip.

I read a really good article today that took me to a slightly different place than the author probably intended for me to go to. Although, because of the overall message, I’m pretty sure that he wouldn’t mind.

“When IT’s Success Is A Flop”

As a part of his treatment of the subject, he talks about how there can be numerous reasons why an IT project might fail, and theyr’e not always obvious. Basically, many people may have a different idea of what “success” means, and depending on your perspective, one person’s “success,” may be another person’s, “aw, man… I need a new job.”

So, it’s really important, no matter what business you’re in, to really keep an open mind about everything that’s going on around you. You can frequently avoid an office land mine by just being aware and thinking about how someone else might see something that’s taking place.

I’ve frequently advocated that leaders should always work out on the production floor or sit in the cubicle farm for a while. They need that perspective to operate effectively as a leader. As soon as a leader forgets what that perspective looks like, it becomes hard to think like an employee and you have no ability to empathize.

And, you can apply all of this to department on department interactions. Spend time with the IT people, or the design people. At least understand their world a little bit, and also get a little bit a personal connection with them. When conflict arises, it’s a lot easier to bark at someone you barely know or don’t know at all; it’s a lot easier to see another person’s perspective when you have some degree of connection with them.

Sometimes, success in business–and for that matter, life–is being able to step outside of your comfort zone and look at how another person lives.

My friend, Bill Sherman, posted about Seth Godin’s “Are you in the tribe?” post.

Go read Bill’s post and Seth’s post. I’ll wait.

Do you want to be in the tribe yet? Of course you do.

If you’ve ever heard of Robert Cialdini, you know why you want to be a part of the tribe. Dr. Cialdini wrote about the principles of persuasion. He described these principles as the “click whirr” parts of our brain. When people invoke them, we respond almost automatically. Anybody can invoke them, but it takes a talented person to use them and not come off like a sleezy car salesman. That person is Seth Godin.

He’s heavily invoked the “Scarcity” principle, which basically means that as long as something is hard to come by, you can get people to buy it. That’s why you see a lot of ads on late-night television touting that some deal is for “a limited time only!!!” The three  exclamation points are mandatory.

He’s also got “Social Validation” running in there too. Social validation is the idea that you want this product because everyone else has it too, and you don’t want to be the one left out of it… do you? If you don’t have it and everyone else does, you’ll be left out of the club… er… tribe.

He’s probably got a whole lot more in there, but I just gave it a cursory glance. Oh yeah, he’s edited that no one else can get in, because of the overwhelming response. That’s some more scarcity.

Give Seth a round of applause if you’re a member of the tribe. He’s a master of Cialdini’s principles. I wish I was, but I moved too late to be part of the club.

I really like small town newspapers. The big ones, like the New York Times and WSJ, are good for keeping up with world and national news and topics, but the little ones almost always end up with some gem of insight that shouldn’t be missed. I sometimes think of those larger papers and outlets as how you can feel the main pulse of the nation or the world, but if you want to see the details, you need to keep up with the smaller outlets.

That’s why I really end up liking little articles like this one from Binghamton, New York.

“Wanted: The good employee – Hiring and retaining quality employees is vital for success”

If you go read the article, you can find that smaller businesses worry about the same problems as larger businesses. Everything may be on a larger scale, but they’re still problems. And this little story presents good information about how to get good employees and use techniques that the big boys do.

Just because you’re a smaller business doesn’t mean that you can’t implement good evidence-based practices. If one of the problems that keep you up at night is how many employees that you’re losing to your competitors in their first year of employment, then use that to guide your hiring practices. As William Ritter says in this article, look for the red flags that will inevitably pop up in someone’s work history. Past performance is a very strong predictor of future performance. If you’re looking at a resume that shows a person stays at a job on average of at least two or three years, then you’re probably pretty safe assuming that they’re not going to job-hop.

While larger companies have realized the benefits of retaining quality employees and have enacted programs to do so, many small businesses don’t recognize the cost benefits of retaining current employees versus recruiting and training new workers, Ritter said.

“Some of the large companies have been doing these things for years,” Ritter said. “Small companies never seem to get around to it.”

The nature of our mobile society means employees will leave a job if they don’t feel valued, he said.

These are some very true words that even small businesses can embrace. One of the first jobs that I left, I left because the company didn’t understand this. No matter how many pieces of machinery they purchased, if they lost all of their skilled employees, they’d be crippled and lose their market positioning. In the end, that’s exactly what happened. They failed to keep the best people, and were bleeding all of their talent out into the market. So, in the end, their competitors gobbled them up,  even though the competitors were far smaller.

Just because your business is a small fish in the pond, there is no reason that you can’t use the same evidence-based practices that larger businesses do. Sometimes, that’s how smaller businesses become larger businesses.

Your people aren’t your greatest resource; they’re your only resource. Without them, your place of business becomes a storage facility, holding all of the equipment that does nothing without them.

Don’t trust your brain.

There are some very systematic ways that the brain is designed to be able to function, but it’s not helpful to you in life and business. Here’s some examples based on known psychological concepts and theories that can help you make better decisions.

Primacy and Recency – Your brain is wired to remember the first and last things that you’re presented with. So, if you’ve heard the old adage, “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression,” then you know that it’s definitely got some truth to it. Recency, is the basis of one of the biggest problems in performance management, the halo/horns effect. Not only are these really bad things to do to your employees, but it doesn’t make much sense to make important business decisions based on someone’s bad day.

Faulty Memories – We all feel like our memory is just about like a video camera, where we can rewind it and review what we’ve seen. But, in reality, our memory is relatively faulty. That’s why, even though we tend to think that eyewitness testimony is very reliable, the experts know that it’s not terribly useful. Generally, your memories are fairly patchy, even for things that have happened recently. When I was working in managment I’d keep a file for each employee. Every work shift, I’d write notes for myself with dates on them about what each employee had done (good or bad) and then at the end of the night, I’d stick those notes in each employees file. When it came time for an employee’s annual review, they were convinced that I had a memory like a steel trap. Actually, I just knew what my weaknesses were and planned for them.

Conformity – Human beings really don’t like to stand out, as a general rule. In the 1950’s, Solomon Asch performed some very interesting experiments. He was able to show that if a person was presented with a group who differed in their opinion, they would almost always conform to the group, even if the group was obviously wrong. This is really important knowledge to have when you’re a leader. If you gather a group of people together and try to get individual opinions, you’re very likely to miss out on that perspective. People are much more likely to be honest, if you’re speaking directly to them.

Overall, you need to be aware of how the brain works and what it likes. The more that you know about this, the more that you’ll be able go against what your brain is used to and get more accurate information.

There was an excellent survey conducted by Adecco recently, and the results are really compelling.

To summarize the findings, diversity is something that a number of companies are giving lip service to. They talk about it, but employees are still feeling like they’re being discriminated against. In particular, age discrimination seems to be the one that many people are feeling the most prevalent.

The really nice finding? More diversity = More productive

“Not only do the majority of workers think that a diverse workforce makes their organization more successful, half of respondents (53 percent) felt that the more diverse their company, the more productive a worker they’d become.”

What I personally find really interesting are the methods that they mention as ways to improve diversity in your organization. Each one has some powerful I-O psychological concepts in them.

1) Gain senior management commitment – Training research has presented evidence that when you’re going to have a program, people are more likely to engage if they feel that upper management is invested in the success of the program. If you’ve got senior management buy-in, you’ll get more trainees to buy-in as well.

2) Engage employees in the process – This really is a no-brainer, but it’s been proven through research. If you want employees to disengage with and torpedo a program, force it down their throats and make them feel like they don’t have any say in it. You want success? Let them be involved.

3) Support local/community diversity groups - This is a really good way to help gain your employees’ trust, especially in terms of a diversity training program. Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) can really drive a diversity program. Additionally there are concepts in social psychology and in particular, the work of Robert Cialdini, that apply here. When employees see that you’re really dedicated to diversity, they’re much more likely to do the same thing.

4) Provide diversity training – You can’t just talk about something and expect change. If you want to change behaviors, you have to apply all of the other methods in social and cognitive psychology for creating behavior change. But you also have to give your employees the tools and the methods to learn how to do it. There’s also a bit more here from Cialdini about social proof. When you get a group of people in a room to agree that diversity is important and needs to be given attention, they’ll have a hard time going back on that.

5) Promote open communication - This really goes back to what I mentioned about including your employees in the decisions. If they’re engaged and involved in the decisions, making sure that you have honest, open communication is going to feed that engagement. This also allows you to eradicate a society where discrimination is tolerated. If people feel comfortable coming forward with a complaint, they’re probably going to come to you, before they go visit with the EEOC.

This is a really nicely presented research report and I love the psychology imbedded in it. Excellent work, Adecco. Bravo!

You’ve seen them out in the business world. When they start talking, you’re reminded of late-night commercials that purport to tell you that the perfect knife set can be yours for only $19.95, satisfaction guaranteed. But, wait… there’s more.  They’re the modern snake-oil salesmen.

My grandfather had a lot of good sayings, and I’m well aware that most of them are ones that he’d lifted from somewhere. But that doesn’t make them any less accurate. One of his favorites was, “If something seems like it’s too good be true, it probably is.”

That’s really the key to avoiding the snake-oil salesmen of business topics. When you’re watching them, reading something they’ve written, or talking to one of them, and the hair on the back of your neck stands up, pay attention to that. There are psychological processes in our minds that tend to make us react unconsciously even if we don’t react consciously. When those call out, then it’s best to at the very least pay attention to them.

But, you don’t always want to react that way. If you do react every time you feel slightly skeptical, you’ll rule out even the honest people. So, you can usually ask some questions that’ll help you decide which business propositions have some merit and which ones are designed to separate you from your money.

1) “Can you share some documentation about how this works?” – When you go to buy a car, it’s best that you don’t just take the word of the salesman about how well the car works. You drive it. You kick the tires. You look under the hood. If someone is trying to get you to spend a part of your budget, you need to be just as interested in the inner-workings. If you don’t understand what they give you as evidence, then seek out an expert and ask their opinion.

2) “Do you have some case studies I can read and/or some references I can talk to?” – Anyone who’s not willing to let you talk to the people they’ve done work for, should give you pause about handing them any money. Furthermore, use Google. In the Internet age we’ve got the ability to perform some of our own background checks. Let you fingers do some walking and see what you can find out about them.

3) “Are there other people who are using the same sort of idea?” – Asking a question like this allows you to get an idea of what sort of theory this person is using. It’s also a good way to get a sense of whether you’re dealing with a passionate advocate of an idea or a snake-oil salesman. A snake-oil salesman is going to try to make sure that you think they’re you’re only resource; a passionate advocate will want to talk to you about their ideas and how they came up with them.

This isn’t necessarily a complete list of what you’d want to ask, because depending on the exact situation, you may have specific details you want to cover. But this list gives you an idea of the kinds of things you want to try to get at. Cast some light around. The average snake-oil proposition is going to wilt in the light of day, and you’ll be able to feel better about walking away from such a deal.